Wednesday, July 7, 2010

New Toy

I’ve been craving a Traeger ever since Lowell, Alton and I had some life-changing beef kabobs on Alton’s Traeger a few months ago. I did a bit of research, let the anticipation build up … and finally purchased my very own Traeger last week.

While most home grills run off of gas or charcoal, the Traegers burn custom wood pellets. This grill is really more of a grill/smoker, with temperature settings for smoking, slow-cooking or grilling.

The hopper on the left side is for the wood pellets. For our first round of grilling, Aaron & I used apple wood.

We bought a 3-pound piece of sirloin from Bill the Butcher with a decent fat cap on top. We cooked it on medium for about an hour and then dropped the heat to “smoke” until the internal temperature hit about 140 F.

As we were waiting for our smoked beef to finish cooking, we got a bit hungry … so we cooked up a few bacon cheeseburgers on the old gas grill. It is rather wonderful to be a two-grill household!

Finally our beef was ready to eat. Our lack of experience showed through, though. You can see that our beef fell over in the middle of the cooking process and the fat cap was no longer on top of the meat. So not as much of it soaked through the beef as we intended … but the end product was still delicious!